Enterprise management generally refers to managing computing environment in an enterprise that includes a variety of computer platforms and applications. An enterprise management programs referred to herein as enterprise managers, typically include a number of software tools to perform functions such as monitoring databases, scheduling jobs, configuring various data in the enterprise, to manage the overall functions of the computing environment in an enterprise. In doing so, enterprise managers invariably consolidate and process messages and events that are communicated among the platforms, applications, and various tools running on the platforms.
One common problem that users and developers encounter while using enterprise management tools to consolidate enterprise messages is that the messages from different sources such as MVS, UNIX, Tandem, have different message syntax. Thus, while building rules in alert logic filter engines (“ALFE”), users and developers frequently fall into a trap of defining token names that are specific to the originating system.
These different naming conventions for similar types of tokens may raise many inherent problems when processing them. The different naming conventions from different sources also require high maintenance, especially with increasing amount of alerts coming into an enterprise manager.
Further, various alert messages from different systems having different formats make gathering of information and notifying appropriate parties difficult and extremely cumbersome. Different sources shown in FIG. 1 are illustrative of such an example where the different sources communicate messages in different format using their respective names.
FIG. 1 illustrates various systems 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120 that communicate their alert messages to an enterprise manager, all in different formats. For example, event messages generated by one known event manager, connectPATROL conforms to the following format: 
In this instance, the only tokens being used here are objectName and message.
In another example, Topaz 114 sends PEM alerts through SNMP 124, which are parsed by bmcMessageProcessor transformer in the following order:
As illustrated in the above examples, the formats of various messages shown above, as well as other message alerts such as ESQ and ITO, received in PEM, an enterprise manager have entirely different formats. In addition, as described above, each intermediary process may parse the messages differently. With increasing number of actionable alerts coming in, it becomes more and more difficult for the operators to manage, process, and handle alerts. Further, it becomes extremely difficult to automate and coordinate the alert handling and alert reporting processes.